


The Language of Water

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Planet, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Building a Life, Character Study, M/M, Original Character(s), coming back home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 19:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16290464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: Keith moves through the phases of his life, just as the tide rolls over the shores, bringing with it the various things taken and ultimately returned to him.[Written for the Wild Fyre Keith zine.]





	The Language of Water

**Author's Note:**

> As stated in the summary, this was my submission for [Wild Fyre](https://twitter.com/keith_zine), a zine focused on nature and our good boy Keith! My theme was the coast, and yes all hints of Sheith are there at the end of this, as the story is mostly a Keith-centric one. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this look at the Red Paladin, and as always you can find me over here on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/bymidnightflame)!

The ocean here doesn’t roar. It doesn’t crash or scream, or drown out voices as though Mother Nature has something to prove with how loud her shores can bellow at humanity. 

What Keith hears as he stands at the edge of this earth, the waves tugging at his ankles, is a lullaby. It’s the quiet song of a world meeting its end, and it’s the most serene thing he has ever heard. But he knows that new beginnings are like this, for inevitably, some things must pass for others to begin. In his jacket pocket rests the key to something bigger than himself. 

A chance in a world that hasn’t given him very many of them. 

The Garrison is no safe harbor. It will test him in ways his life has not thought of yet, will force him to think of something greater than himself, and in that to take account for those around him. It’s a far cry from his orphan’s tale, bundled in the ideation of ‘I and I alone.’ The Garrison will be the start of the life denied to him from his very beginnings, and it will have its trials and tribulations. But, nothing in this world has broken him yet. 

Keith can’t imagine the Garrison could ever hold anything that would. 

He watches as the sun skirts the horizon, hard-pressed by the encroaching night but still bleeding life into the sky with its oranges and reds. There’s something about a sunset that feels like home to him, staining the very edge of an all-consuming darkness with fire and fight. It casts a golden glow over the sands, already a strange purple in hue, and sets the whole beach to glittering in the fading light. 

A gift from the mountains. Or so a local fisherman had said while Keith perused his acceptance letter once more over grilled cheese and Coke, the staples of his soon to be lost-youth. And he likes that idea too, of losing the already lost, as if there’s no need to find it when he can finally build something more for himself. There are few things to call your own when you don’t even have a past to define you, but a future - that’s promising ground.

Keith swears he sees it in this sand with its lilac hue and water, unfathomable and dark, washing over it with all the soft-spoken certainty the tide brings. It always ebbs, always flows, always finds its calling in the moon. These things are as solid as stone. The ocean washes over shores with its quiet song, whispering of tomorrows to come; as surely as the moon will rise, and the sun will set, and his heart will keep on beating its fearless tune.

And the ocean? That may be larger than his life seems right now. But the universe? That’s infinitely more so, and Keith now has the chance to dive into it and find that name for himself. 

So, on this last day of his old existence, he stands there, listening to farewells on sands dyed purple from neighboring peaks, and lets the smallest of smiles take his lips. 

The world ends. And when he opens his eyes, another one will begin.

*

The ocean still sings, rolling her quiet notes along the shoreline in time to his every breath. He’s been trying to match them, to give some semblance of rhythm and rhyme to this life that’s betrayed him. Betrayed his hopes, maybe that’s the more apt way to put this. Because he’s still here, still alive, still breathing, still staring at the fading lines of light along the horizon like it’s got the last flickers of flame he needs to keep this fight going.

They called it pilot error. Keith called it a grievous disservice against those who had tried for so much more than the Garrison could have ever dreamed of, and that in turn had led to a rather grievous parting of ways.

A generous term for getting kicked out. He almost wants to laugh at himself for that and nearly does, when a gull starts calling out like it got the universal joke of it all. The birds, the sea. . .they all get it. Keith is just the last one in on it, and now he’s standing here again with his feet bare and dug into violet sands.

It’s not the exact same spot, but he remembers this part of the beach, where the water sings and surges around rocks, rough-edged and black as sin-spots on a soul. Half a step to the left, and he’d have to climb his way out. Another to the right, and he’d need to skirt around stones until the sands rolled out into an effortless stretch of beach. But something about this spot feels like the place he needs to be, nestled in a stony bed with the same soft lullaby washing over him. 

Because all things end. They inevitably end.

Keith just didn’t think wings got clipped before they knew flight.

The pain of _missing_ sits within him like a shipwreck newly drowned. Shards of wood and memories of better days left to rot away beneath the waves, his potential rusting within locked treasure chests and now sunk to the depths. Everything he could have been just gone.

Everything he had thought to want. . .gone. 

And it happens like that, which is the real shit thing about life. One moment you’re standing there, right at the edge and seeing the way the world unfurls before you, miles and miles of uncharted territory and you just thrumming with excitement over the adventure waiting for you. The next thing you know you’ve lost sight of it all, swallowed by storm surge and grey skies, the churning of waves rising to insurmountable walls. 

Keith keeps waiting for the crash.

Instead, all he hears is the quiet song of farewell, washing over rock and skin alike. When he finds the horizon again, there’s only a thin strip of red burning over the ocean’s surface. Darkness above, darkness below, and between it all, that red line persists.

He doesn’t wait for the moment night finally snuffs it out.

*

“A red tide.”

Spoken to no one. The skies maybe, or that restless thing roaming around in his heart. Keith doesn’t know, but he had felt the need to speak, as though in speaking he could solidify something of this phenomenon before him. Maybe try to understand it a little more, drawing lines between it and what he’s already come to know. 

He is Voltron, and he is not. He is human, and he is not. The seawater here is liquid fire, but fire it is not.

It’s like someone had cut the hearts out of the stars, and as the hopes bled out of them, they had fallen from the skies and plummeted into this ocean. Here, they float among the waves and flicker, burning out the last of their days in a foreign sea. One of the planet’s inhabitants, a small humanoid creature with skin as bright as blue skies and eyes that glimmered like the morning sun, had smiled at him as she spoke of it. 

The glow tide. 

Hundreds of small bioluminescent organisms that bloomed from coral reefs intermittently throughout the year. During the day, the shorelines turned dark red with their bodies, but beneath moonlight and with a little agitation, they pulsed with crimson light. The water’s surface now shimmers with their life-force. 

_Not harmful_ , she had said. _But they’ll die by the thousands in a few days time. That’s when the ocean really bleeds over the sands._

The Old Ones had called it the astramier. 

_It’s sad but beautiful. Very beautiful._ Spoken with a smile born of awe. She had rows of pointed teeth, a delicate edge to the curve of her lips, and not an ounce of real grief. _You’ll never see anything like it in all the universe_.

Keith thinks the Old Ones had it right. This isn’t a glowing tide worth drawing dozens to the shores just to _ooh_ and _ahh_ over it like some oceanic ticker tape parade. It’s the death of stars, with all the brilliance of last moments. Out with a bang, and yeah, somewhere, some world figures it’s somehow worth rejoicing over. The beauty of impermanence, is that it? Of lives so fleeting they flicker bright, and in the next breath, they're gone.

Just gone.

That thing starts kicking up a fuss in his heart. It pounds on the walls and puts a tumult into his blood flow. He takes a shuddering breath, closes his eyes, and turns his head to the sky. Here, in the deep dark of night, surrounded by the familiar sound of waves, he can almost convince himself of home. That place he had tried to tell himself he belonged but somehow managed to elude him time and time again. 

Things go missing. People go missing. Sometimes Keith feels like a part of himself goes missing. Or maybe, it always has been. And that’s why that thing keeps roaming around in his heart, searching and searching, calling out for all the various bits that might settle his soul, the stuff that makes a person whole. 

Just when he thinks he has it, that feeling of coming together, the universe throws another curve in his path and he realizes he still has further to go. Voltron had become a part of that idea of home. But in finding Voltron, he had come back to his past and all the questions it still carried. One door opens, and beyond that, not a room to settle into and make your own but an endless hallway littered with more doors. 

He could spend a lifetime wondering which one to open, and still another one exploring all the possibilities. 

When he opens his eyes, the waves are tipped with fire. They spill it all over the sand with every crash against the shore. Lives burning bright red all around his feet. Flashing, flashing, like fireflies trying to find love before fall overtakes summer and sends them all to slumber. 

Lips part and he exhales, staring down at the sand. 

They keep flashing, and he keeps breathing, and if that isn’t that damnedest thing about it all. A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth, persistent and full of wry acknowledgment. 

He is still very much alive. 

Keith turns his head and glances over the length of the beach. Further down, there’s a harbor with a small village stretching out behind it. A dim yellow glow halos it all, dozens of lights strung between the huts with torches parading down to the water’s edge. But out here, there is only silence and darkness showering down around him. 

His lips part again as a small huff of laughter bursts out into the night. He’s still alive. After months and months of fighting, he is still standing. He doesn’t know if he’s any closer to the answers he wants or if this war is drawing to its close, but he is still here. One breath in, then another out. Everything comes in its time, and patience supposedly yields focus. That’s how it all went, right? 

Turning his gaze to the sky above, studded with its golden moon and the twinkle of starlight, he starts wading out. Step after step, he presses on and all around him, the water keeps burning. Another inch forward, another pulse of light. 

Keith turns around, his back to the ocean’s expanse, and with a grin overtaking his lips, he simply. . .lets go.

The water swells around him, warm and glittering. As it takes him under, he can hear that thing in his heart quieting down until all the sound within him has drowned. With the wet sinking into his clothes and his body rising towards the surface, Keith reaches for the sky. His fingertips burst with light, dozens of red sparks drifting out into the beyond, and as his hand breaches the surface and the air enters his lungs with a life-filling gasp, the sky erupts with starlight above him.

*

The ocean here breathes life. Its waves wash over golden sands, this steady pulse of water meeting earth, as if Mother Nature herself has come to remind him that all things break down, all things are renewed, that all life persists.

Over and over again, the ocean sings. 

Over and over, Keith listens to its song. Because some things end while others begin, and still some run as constant as Time throughout his life. The universe has dared to declare the starting point of peace, complete with a hero’s welcome bundled up in a farewell and a moment, a true and honest moment, to call his own. Before him, the ocean stretches out endlessly toward the horizon; to his right, the beach unfurls itself beneath the sun. But to his left and at his back, red-streaked stone climbs up around him. The waves spill in through an opening along the shore, gliding into the cave with no more concern for intrusion than a cat has when it curls up in your lap. 

He finds it an odd comfort. 

The waves roll in. Keith breathes out. 

Perhaps the world will keep fighting, and maybe they’ll be called back into the fray, but for now, there is simply this.

Living.

Keith inhales slowly. There’s salt in the air and sunshine pours down through an opening above, a near perfect circle worked out of the stone and offering an unhindered view. The sky is a cloudless piercing brand of blue, crisp and clean, like a freshly washed blackboard or a tide pool after you’ve stopped stamping through it. The dust clears and when the sediment settles, you can see right down to the bottom.

There’s one now that he currently has his feet buried in, toes sunk into the sand and the waves occasionally feeding into it. And all the while, he’s been tapping out a rhythm against his motorcycle helmet. One fingertip after another creating a nameless rhythm as the day around him burns away. He finds that there’s a strange sort of emptiness to that notion, of seconds being pulled into the abyss of Time with every breath, every spill of water over sand. It’s not the sort of empty that eats away at a man, but rather the hollow where something large and imposing once sat but no longer does. 

It’s the sort of empty that’s waiting to be filled again, and it comes with this spark of Hope flickering down in the depths of it.

There’s promise in that space, a place where he gets to craft something of his own devising. Keith feels his lips pulling into a smile. Seconds later, a laugh spills out between them. The rhythm his fingers had been keeping is interrupted by the sound, and as silence begins to fill the cavernous space around him, he traces the curve of his helmet instead. The red of it seems to glow beneath the splash of sunlight from above, as resplendent as the fires of rebirth.

“How does it feel?”

Keith glances up at the sound of that voice. It’s familiar and warm, as known to him as his own soul is.

Shiro is standing there at the mouth of the cave. His pants are rolled to the knees, and he holds his shoes in his right hand. With his left arm, he gestures to the space around them, twisting at his waist to indicate the entirety of it all. But, it’s the smile on his lips, full of joy unfiltered and this lightness of being, that holds Keith’s attention.

He knows that question isn’t just about some spot on the beach they’ve found for themselves. It’s not about the thrill of being back on Earth, the beauty of solitude or the end of an era. 

“I don’t know yet, honestly.”

It’s about building a beginning. 

“But for the first time in my life, I think that’s okay,” Keith follows up, his gaze lingering on Shiro. 

He is young, but not so young that the monumental yawn of The Future before him incites trepidation. There are scars on his skin, some carved so deep he knows his bones will still tell their tales, and there are doors inside his head he’s not yet ready to open again. But he’s not afraid. They will have their time and place, just as his story will find its own in the annals of history. 

For now, though, there is the quiet song of the ocean, and there is a man grinning at him like he somehow got every bit of it right. 

And maybe he did. He’s here, after all, alive and relatively well for all that a war-ravaged soul can claim to be. There’s hope sitting in the holes of his life, and potential brewing at the starting line of another chapter. Maybe this one will never get told, not in the way that makes it into the history books. People don’t often care about the afters of most of their heroes, not unless they go down in some glorious set of flames. 

People like the falls as much as they like the rise; they don’t much care for the settling of lives, and Keith is perfectly fine with that.

Let them spin their tales of daring. Let them lament the tragic declines from greatness.

He will keep the quiet and the warmth of a gaze that knows the very depths of who he is. He will take the open air and the rush of creating something all his own. He will flourish in the small space of _you and me_.

“You know. . .that sounds about right,” Shiro laughs. 

They will make themselves their own universe instead of riding on the legacy of another’s. 

There must have been an infectious quality to Shiro’s laughter because Keith is laughing before he realizes it. It seems they’re both standing at the same place for once, and there’s something positively liberating about that notion. After a life of playing catch-up and trying to live up to ideals and expectations, he’s come right back to the beginning.

Maybe not full circle. Not with pockets loaded with experience to tell him otherwise. 

He pushes himself back up to standing. With his helmet in one hand, he begins brushing the sand from his pants with the other. Shiro’s laughter echoes all around him. Keith feels it mixing with the sunlight from above, bright and unbridled, all of it sinking right into his skin. After a moment, he starts grinning. Staring out through the fringe of his hair, he flashes it at Shiro and finds the man grinning right back in response. 

With a kick of his foot through the tide pool, Keith takes the first steps towards him.

“How does it feel, Shiro?”

Behind him, he knows the sediment will settle and that the ocean will keep feeding into its beach-locked pools. Just as the stars will continue to die and cough-up their cosmic dust all over galaxies and that will somehow find its way into the very air they breathe. When he pulls to a halt before Shiro, he’s greeted with a smile, small and warm and full of welcome.

“Like I finally found my life. . .”


End file.
